Mirantis has raised another $10 million from Red Hat, Ericsson and SAP Ventures to fuel the growing demand for the build out of OpenStack systems for private and public cloud environments. The financing came in a second round of Series A funding.
Mirantis raised $10 million in December from Dell Ventures, Intel Capital, and West Summit Capital, which also participated in this current round. Mirantis CEO Adrian Ionel said in an email that when Mirantis did the first part of the round, some investors wanted to put in more money.
We didn’t want to take it at that valuation (we were profitable and $10m was plenty for us). Instead we agreed to do a future closing at a completely different valuation if we achieve certain business milestones. We delivered and so we got to the second closing.
Mirantis, one of the founding members of OpenStack, has prospered by piecing together the different parts of the compute, storage and network that comprise an OpenStack infrastructure. OpenStack has had seven releases, the latest being Grizzly. Development is done by the community, with different companies offering their own technology as integration pieces for OpenStack.
Red Hat has become one of the power players in OpenStack, so it makes sense they participated in the round. The company recently emerged as the one making the most commits to the OpenStack project.
The skill sets to build out an OpenStack infrastructure are in high demand. SAP, for example, has worked with OpenStack for building out its own infrastructure.
Mirantis has also updated Fuel, its do-it-yourself kit for OpenStack, which developed out of a Mirantis library that consisted of frameworks that integrate different capabilities. For example, Mirantis implemented a Puppet library for automating infrastructure. It previously did not give access to the library.
The new version is available for free under an Apache 2.0 license. It has a visual user interface, a single control plane, new automation features and support for Grizzly, the latest OpenStack release. Later this year, the company plans to release Fuel Enterprise, a commercial-grade distribution of Fuel that will be available to its subscription customers.
Mirantis has become one of the most recognized players in OpenStack. Fuel will be critical to its future, as OpenStack becomes more accessible to the larger market. But in that they will face a growing number of companies offering their own turnkey implementations. Cloudscaling and Piston Cloud are two of the better known startups in the space.
Ionel said the difference is that Fuel doesn’t lock the customer into a specific distribution or very narrow hardware and network configuration.
“And we open sourced it,” Ionel said.